The small sounds of before
no louder than a bird a block away,
the mini-fridge, the breeze in leaves.
These quiet voices say Again.

2.
The first thing you notice
about children
is how loud their voices are,
piercing the educated
calm of the ordinary day.
School mutes them, eventually
teaches mumble, buys silence,
silence is best. I was a child once
but it didn’t last. Now hear
my whispering roar.

3.
Culture seems sometimes
built on blame.
Eve’s temptation,
Prometheus’s presumption,
lots of Latin words for
how bad we are and why
all things we have seem stolen
and money masters mind.
And all these years we race
to put things right.

4.
A stone, any stone can be
a column in front of your house too,
Socrates, to lean on while you think,
that wordless dream
from which sometimes
truth wakes to speak.

5.
The trees of course know better.
They proliferate
and thereby civilize.
We think better in their shade.

6.
I keep trying to figure things out,
cold fingers, Wallace Stevens,
compass on the dashboard,
Bruckner’s Ninth, tomorrow
turns out to be one more today.
I don’t dare close the window.
If I had a fireplace and a fire in it
I’d tear the calendar off the wall
and toss it in. But no calendar.
Just the wall. A wall is good.
Pray to the wall and close my eyes.

7.
And then she woke again
and was the Sun.
The Moon in his sly way
had left her once again.
The planet lay outspread
before her, breakfast,
this sumptuous reality.
She smiles now as she feeds
us from the sky, we eager trees.

8.
Wait. Go back to Hartford,
Whorf and Stevens
due east of here, an hour
and some over away,

where Charlotte was born,
my wife, my life renewed.
And their river too flows
both ways, sea slips inland
and heals the country silence.

Maybe not so strange they
both were businessmen by day,
the linguist and the poet—
what more could love require
to sing itself into presence
and overwhelm the doubt?

I watch my sleeping wife
and learn to speak.

6 September 2020